You're ready to make a custom photo book. You've selected your theme and picked out your photos. But what do you do if some of the shots you want to include aren't quite perfect? There's no need to delete them from your project — use these six photo editing tips to fix your pictures instead.

Choose the Right Photo Editor

Mixbook Studio offers a few powerful, easy-to-use photo editing tools. For basic edits like cropping and adjustments to brightness, saturation, contrast, and opacity, you can use Mixbook Studio. If you need to do more extensive editing, you can use

• The capabilities built into your phone's camera app OR
• A photo editing app or photo editing website

If you prefer to use an iOS or Android app, we recommend using PicsArt. If you want to edit photos on your computer's browser, we suggest Fotor.

Start with Auto Correction

Built-in smartphone camera apps, PicsArt, and Fotor all have an "auto correct" or "auto enhance" option that will automatically fix basic problems with your image. Simply click the "auto" button in the app, then review the changes.

For example, you might have a photo that's dim and poorly lit. Auto correct can fix these problems. Starting with this utility can save you time making adjustments to attributes like brightness and saturation.

Please note: It's important to save the original copy of your image before you do any further edits. Saving a copy allows you to go back and start over if you make edits but don't like the results.

Take Care of Cropping

If you're designing a holiday photo card, you might want to crop your shot so that recipients can see your family's faces. Cropping can also be an effective way to eliminate unwanted objects or people from the background of your photo.

Thankfully, Mixbook Studio automatically takes care of cropping when you use the "Auto-Create" feature. You'll have an opportunity to review and refine cropping before your project is printed.

If you're planning on designing your next Mixbook project yourself instead of using the Auto-Create feature, crop your photos using your smartphone's built-in camera, PicsArt, or Fotor.

Sharpen Your Images

If you're creating a family photo book or wedding photo book, you want to use your best photos. But sometimes photos of those big moments might be a little blurry. Try sharpening the image in your preferred photo editor or app.

Sharpening helps to remove noise and blurriness caused by digital cameras. It brings small details into focus, which makes it the perfect tool when you want to draw attention to something like the embroidered details on a wedding dress.

Adjust Highlights, Shadows, Saturation & Brightness

You can stylize your photos to suit any theme with the help of color- and light-value tools such as highlights, shadows, saturation, and brightness. Go slowly as you adjust these values. Significantly increasing or decreasing values in any of these areas can lead to quality loss.

Highlights and Shadows

Highlights are the lightest areas of any image, while shadows are the darkest areas of a photo. Strong, defined highlights and shadows add depth to your photos. If your photo seems too dark, try increasing the highlights. If it seems too flat, try increasing the shadows.

Saturation

Saturation describes how bright the colors in a photo appear. If your photos seem dull and you want to make their colors pop, increase saturation. You can decrease saturation if you want to achieve a faded or vintage look.

Brightness

Brightness refers to the overall lightness of an image. Maybe you took a picture of your family in your backyard while it was overcast, and it looks dim or gloomy. You can bump up the brightness to make the photo look lighter.

Reduce Noise

Digital photos often have noise, which is used to describe any unwanted signal interruptions in a picture. Noise includes pixelation as well as random black or white spots on images. Using the noise reduction setting in your photo editing app removes noise and makes your image look softer. You can also use it to make an image look slightly hazy.

Test Out Our Photo Editing Tips

Remember that practice makes perfect. It might take more than one try to learn new photo editing techniques, but the effort is well worth it. Knowing theese basic photo editing tips and tricks will make all of your Mixbook creations pop. Don't forget to show off your photo editing know-how by starting a custom photo book or photo calendar today!